Why Republicans Could Regret Overturning Roe v. Wade

The mood at this year’s March for Life, an annual anti-abortion demonstration held in Washington, D.C., is likely to be buoyant, infused by the glow of Donald Trump’s Inauguration.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK PETERSON / REDUX

Every year around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade_—_January 22, 1973—protesters from across the country gather in Washington, D.C., for the March for Life, an anti-abortion demonstration that begins at the National Mall and ends on the steps of the Supreme Court. Had Hillary Clinton been elected President, the mood at this year’s march, which will take place on January 27th, might have been glum. Instead, it is likely to be buoyant, infused by the glow of Donald Trump’s Inauguration, which has rekindled hopes that Roe may soon be gone.

During his campaign, Trump vowed to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe, and he has repeated his promises since the election. How many such appointments he will actually make remains to be seen. But it is not inconceivable that, during Trump’s time in office, both of the high court’s senior liberal members—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is eighty-three, and Stephen Breyer, who is seventy-eight—will depart from the Court. If Trump fulfills his promise to replace them with “pro-life” Justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia, he could pave the way for Roe’s demise.

For members of the anti-abortion movement, this would be a dream scenario. But is hastening Roe’s demise something the Republican Party really wants? To liberals who have grown accustomed to hearing Republicans denounce the opinion in the most strident terms, the question may sound naïve. There is nothing they want more, it often seems. But the denunciations mask an irony: for the conservative movement, Roe has not been such a bad thing. Conservatives may indeed benefit more from Roe’s preservation than from its being overturned.

The most direct beneficiaries of Roe have been women of all political persuasions, whose right to control their own bodies and to avoid forced childbirth was not recognized before the ruling. But conservatives have also reaped benefits since the late nineteen-seventies, when strategists like Paul Weyrich, the co-founder of the Moral Majority, shrewdly recognized that social issues like abortion could broaden the Republican Party’s base beyond the business class. “Yes,” social issues “are emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation,” Weyrich said. As the recent election showed, this strategy can yield dividends even for candidates who have never seemed especially moved by the plight of the unborn. For much of his life, Trump described himself as pro-choice. He was more likely to be spotted at a night club than at a pro-life rally. All of this changed when Trump ran for President, at which point he began courting evangelicals like Jerry Falwell, Jr., and rebranding himself as a committed right-to-lifer.

The transformation may have been cynically motivated, but it appears to have paid off. According to exit polls, eighty per cent of white evangelicals supported Trump, compared with only sixteen per cent for Clinton. Trump also won the Catholic vote. Trump’s crude denigration of women, his multiple divorces, the “Access Hollywood” tape in which he boasted about sexual assault: all of this was forgiven by evangelical leaders like James Dobson, who in the nineteen-nineties advocated impeaching Bill Clinton for his sexual indiscretions. Like much of the religious right, Dobson endorsed Trump last fall, citing his “stellar” list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

Of course, promising to appoint anti-choice Justices to the Supreme Court risks alienating other voters—in particular, millions of women who may be loath to undergo the horrors and indignities of the pre-Roe_ _era, when terminating a pregnancy was dangerous and illegal. (Many of them will be gathering in Washington on Saturday, for the Women’s March.) Being forced to live in a country where abortion at any stage of pregnancy, for whatever reason, is equated with murder—a standard view on the Christian right—would almost surely arouse opposition, if not fury, among millennial women who have grown up in a pro-choice country and, like most Americans, show few signs of wanting to turn back the clock. A recent survey by the Pew Research Institute found that sixty-nine per cent of Americans oppose overturning Roe, the highest level since researchers began sampling opinion on the question. Polls have consistently shown that most Americans oppose barring abortion under all circumstances.

As long as Roe remains in effect, however, this spectre is distant and abstract. Since the Supreme Court, as it has been constituted in recent years, could be counted on to strike down a blanket ban on abortion, Republicans have been able to embrace anti-abortion absolutism while avoiding the political repercussions of putting this absolutism into practice. They have focussed instead on passing measures that chip away at Roe, a less incendiary approach that has proved highly effective. Since 2010, states have adopted three hundred and thirty-eight new abortion restrictions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which estimates that fifty-seven per cent of women now live in states that are “hostile or extremely hostile” to abortion rights. Meanwhile, the abortion rate has declined sharply, in part because of better access to contraceptive services and in part because of punitive restrictions. From state-mandated counselling to lengthy waiting periods to onerous regulations targeting clinics, opponents of reproductive rights have succeeded in limiting access to abortion while putting advocates of choice on the defensive.

The fact that the anti-abortion movement has been able to advance its broader agenda does not mean that its leaders are any less determined to do away with Roe, of course. Nor does it mean that Trump will hesitate to give them what they want, in terms of appointing a Justice who would overturn Roe, not least since the process could take a while, delaying the political backlash that doing away with the ruling could spark. In an interview with Lesley Stahl, of “60 Minutes,” after the election, Trump affirmed that, if Roe were reversed, women in states where abortion was criminalized would simply have to travel to other states. “We’ll see what happens,” he then told Stahl. “That has a long, long way to go.”

Trump, a gambler who has never balked at leaving others to deal with the mess he creates, may be betting that any backlash triggered by overturning Roe will be someone else’s problem. And he may be right. But if such a scenario eventually does come to pass, pro-choice Americans may not be the only ones longing for the days when right-to-life activists gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court to air their grievances.

If mifepristone has not changed the debate around abortion, it has had a practical impact in the lives of many women.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.